


Somebody That I Used To Know

by evieeden



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Emotional Hurt, F/M, Natasha Feels, Natasha-centric, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 16:28:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8807872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evieeden/pseuds/evieeden
Summary: Natasha wasn't troubled when Bucky didn't recognise her. Not much anyway.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So here's the advent fic for the 6th December. I can appreciate that I'm four days behind, but work and general tiredness caught up to me this week. Still I'm hoping to catch up on them all over this weekend and the next couple of days so bear with me.  
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one with some Natasha and thanks so much for reading.

Natasha left Tony nursing his shoulder and making plans to fly to the US and back before Steve could make any concrete plans and leave the country.

A quick check with Sharon – bruised back, one cracked rib, one sprained wrist and now one tracking device stuck to the inside of her windbreaker – confirmed that T’Challa wasn’t planning on leaving the CIA’s office for at least another three hours. That left plenty of time for FRIDAY to finish running her scans on possible escape routes that Steve, Bucky and Sam could take and for Natasha to put her own feelers out before she had to recruit the Wakandan king to their side.

She knew it wouldn’t take much. The man was blinded by his grief and his need for revenge, both easy emotions to manipulate into action.

As she walked down the hallway, she caught sight of Ross boasting loudly, a grinning sneer on his face.

She scowled at the sight. He threatened to turn them in, make them criminals and hunt them down just because they were more powerful than his pathetic, grasping self.

She had been to Harlem. She had seen the results of a weak man fighting to be relevant. While she and Bruce may never…

He was still her friend, he had still been kind to her, and this pathetic, old man had tried to make him suffer for being better than him.

On an impulse, Natasha pulled her phone out of her pocket, her pocket, her fingers flying over the familiar digits with speed.

The phone rang, then kept on ringing.

Clint was already in then – he was already wary of the Accords, but if there was something going on outside of Barnes’ impending death sentence, then he would have agreed to help Steve in an instant. Which meant that Wanda would be soon to follow. Natasha idly wondered if she should call the compound and give Vision a heads up about Clint’s impending visit, but in the end decided to let it play out.

While she understood Tony’s logic behind keeping Wanda safe from those who would abuse and exploit the young girl, she also knew that being locked away would cause Wanda stress, something to be avoided when her powers could be adversely affected by her moods. No matter what Tony thought, she knew Ross was just waiting for the guard at the compound to lose focus and then he would have the young girl.

God, Natasha hated him.

It was curious to her to feel such a strong emotion towards the man, but then today seemed the day for it.

A small part of her wished that Clint would come for her too, but she also knew that she had made her bed in that regard. She would have to wait for now, play the long game. But for now…

Anger, jealousy, disappointment, worry. She was practically bathed in emotions and now was really the time she needed to have a level head.

She ducked into an empty office and folded herself underneath the desk, compacting her body to the extent that nobody would be able to see where she was unless they were in the room and facing the right direction.

Making herself invisible was a skill she had been taught early in life – to hide, to tactically retreat and to consider – and it was one she used now without a shred of regret.

She needed this moment, needed this chance away from Tony, away from Ross, away from Sharon, just to dissect the hollowness in the pit of her stomach that threatened to overwhelm everything else.

Disappointment.

She had felt it before of course – when a shot went awry, or a mark caught wind of her trail or when her exit was compromised.

But it had never felt so all-consuming and bitter as this time.

He hadn’t recognised her.

Barnes hadn’t even flinched before he was practically slamming her through the table.

He hadn’t remembered her back in DC either, but at least then she’d had the comfort of knowing that he hadn’t recognised Steve either. If he hadn’t remembered the man that he had spent most of his early – natural – life with, then she couldn’t expect him to recognise her after only a few years together, most of which was spent in cryo or kept separate while the Black Widows were being trained. She could understand it, even if it stung.

At the time, Barnes’ loss of memory was less devastating to her than the bullet in her shoulder, the looming downfall of SHIELD and the realisation that when it came down to it, Nick didn’t trust her like she thought.

 When he rescued Steve from the Potomac, she had felt that despondency lift.

The type of electroshock treatment, brainwashing and general abuse was horrific and in most cases irreversible, but somehow Steve had managed to break through to what was left of his battered memory.

If Barnes could remember one thing, one person, then with time, away from Hydra, away from everything, surely he could remember others.

Only she, Steve and Sam couldn’t find him. And then when they did, he and Steve were being arrested before she even had a chance to get anywhere near him.

Then the words…then the trigger…

Natasha had known when she, Tony and Sharon cobbled together a plan to take Barnes out as he carved his way through the task force was doomed to fail if she couldn’t subdue him. Tony only had a prototype gauntlet built into his watch, and beyond the Iron Man suit, he wasn’t a skilled fighter and Sharon, while trained by the best SHIELD could offer, wasn’t any match for the Winter Soldier at his most lethal.

But she had hoped that she would be the key, just like Rogers was back in Washington. (Damnit! Where was Steve?) That Barnes would see her and recognise that they knew each other and just stop, the training and indoctrination broken.

It was a stupid hope and a part of her knew it even as she thought it.

The Winter Soldier had put Stark down and then Sharon too, although she guessed it could be counted as a blessing that they were only winded rather than… well, dead.

But she was there and it was…

A dance. The same one she had been doing with him since she was thirteen.

He had blocked her kicks, she punched him, he had grabbed at her and she used the momentum to scissor her legs and swing herself up onto his shoulders – the same move she had pulled on him in Washington.

_Come on, Yasha, please._

He hadn’t stopped or reacted to her weight on his shoulders but instead had stalked towards the wall. For a second she had thought that he was going to slam her into it. She had started elbowing his head, trying to knock him out or knock his memories or his own mind back into him. But she might have well been trying to knock out one of Stark’s helmets.

There was no reaction.

Well, apart from his metal arm coming up to drag her off him by the neck as if she were nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

He had pinned her and began throttling her easily and her hands had immediately shot up, not to remove the metal hand – there was no way she could do that – but to stop the hand from crushing her windpipe.

In retaliation, she had locked her legs, which were twisted around his neck, so that they tightened, cutting off Barnes’ air flow.

They had both held their positions, knowing that it wouldn’t end until one of them was unconscious or dead from the lack of oxygen.

Barnes had glared down at her and it was in that moment that she had really registered the complete lack of recognition in his eyes.

It wasn’t even that he hadn’t remembered her from her youth or their missions, but that he didn’t even remember her from two years back when they had thought and he had graced her with only the second bullet wound she had ever received.

But he wasn’t a man in that moment. He was a weapon.

And whatever it was that Steve had done that had managed to break through to the man, it didn’t work with her.

It stung.

“You could at least recognise me,” she choked out.

And then he was gone. Disappeared to fight T’Challa, then just plain disappeared with Steve and Sam.

He didn’t know her, hadn’t seen her. She was just another obstacle in his way.

She pressed her forehead against her knees and breathed.

It had been nothing more than she expected and yet it had been so much less than she wanted.

Natasha wouldn’t cry over it though. Black Widows never cried.

So she dug her nails into her legs, breathed and allowed the disappointment, and a slight tang of hurt, to wash over her.

Her phone chirped with the alert FRIDAY had set up for her. It was time to go back to work.

Feelings could wait until after this whole mess was over.


End file.
